[image:291:c]At about 5:15pm Singapore time, I set foot on the Asian continent for the first time. I have to say that so far it doesn’t feel much different to me. Singapore is a beautiful place and there is English everywhere. If we hadn’t been driving on the wrong side of the street, I might have thought I was in the US. It is beautiful and clean.

I’m checked into my hotel room at the Fort Canning Lodge YWCA (the name threw me at first, but it is a regular hotel that is run by the YWCA). As you can see from the picture, I have a beautiful view of the park across the street with the city in the background. Very nice.

The flight was uneventful. The 11 hour and 15 minute flight from Frankfurt was the longest that I’ve ever been on by a couple of hours. It didn’t seem too bad, though as I slept 4 or 5 hours. I’m not too exhausted right now and it is already 7:15pm. I should be able to stay up for several more hours at least. My dad gets in around 1am so I guess I’ll wake up for a few minutes then.

Tomorrow’s agenda is to get over jet lag. We will eat Indian food for lunch and Singaporean food for dinner. It should be quite an adventure. More pictures tomorrow.

Tonight, I’m headed to Singapore. It will be my first time to go to Asia so it will all be new for me. I’m meeting with a team Campus Crusade Staff from around the world about how we measure our ministry. It will have a significant impact on our ministry around the world.

I’m mostly looking forward to it because my dad will be there. It will be great to spend 6 days together.

Asian food isn’t my favorite so we’ll see if the real thing is better than the exported kind. I’ll get plenty of chances to find out.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to post pictures and updates while I’m there.

For the last two days, I’ve been sitting in school board meetings. Every year the board of ICSB has a two day “retreat” to focus on strategic issues fo the school. This time we were working on transitioning to a concept called Policy Governance. It is a method of operating the board where we can focus more on strategic issues while leaving the details up to the director.

The cool part of the time is that we had a facilitator come and lead our time. His name is John Schimmer and we have a cool connection. His daughter, Jackie, and I went to school at Trinity Christian Academy and Texas A&M together. It was fun to spend some time with him and he did a great job with the training.

It was a busy two days, but we accomplished quite a bit. I don’t always say that after board meetings, but this was a landmark meeting for the school.

I am sitting here in the airport in Kiev on my way back to Budapest (Free WiFi in the Kiev airport!!!). We were meeting with our team that is creating a Russian Language Internet Ministry. We made a lot of progress especially in the area of responding to visitors. We were trained to use a Ministry Response Center that will allow us to distribute emails to volunteers automatically. I was only able to stay for part of the week, but I’m really excited about the possibilities. I think that this will enable our ministry to reach many, many russian speakers with the gospel. We are all ready to go and wish everything could be done by tomorrow. Hopefully, things can be live at the first of April.

It was my third trip to Kiev and I continue to enjoy the town and the people. It is a great city to visit and our staff with Ukraine for Christ are extremely friendly. It was cold and snowy, just as you would expect it to be in Ukraine in the winter. Jerry blogged about our adventures finding a taxi.

Back home for a couple of days of School Board Meetings (YAAWWWNNN).

Today was a day of thanksgiving for Valerie & I. No, there was no turkey, cranberry sauce, or dressing. We spent the morning writing thank-you notes to people that gave to our ministry in the past month. Writing thank-you notes is not our favorite pass time as it takes a lot of energy and time, but it was wonderful to see how the Lord has provided for us.

In order to make the process more palatable, we went into downtown Budapest and ate breakfast at the Vista Cafe. It is a great little cafe that has wonderful American-like breakfasts. I had some type of egg, hash brown, sausage scramble and Valerie had a Mushroom, Onion & Spinach Omlette. It was nice and not too expensive.

After breakfast, we stayed at the restaurant and wrote thank-you notes for a couple of hours. As each name came up, we wrote, prayed for them, and thanked God for his provision. We have had significant expenses related to my back surgery and the Lord continues to provide. Amazing.

Thank-You to those of you that are partners in our ministry. Your prayers and gifts are such a blessing to us.

One of the major projects that I’m working on right now is creating a measurement tool for our campus ministry. It will be a web-based application that will allow our staff to measure their activities and use the information to better lead their efforts.

We are working on the project for Eastern Europe & Russia, but we learned along the way that there was another effort to do the same for Campus Crusade globally. Since we were working on a similar project, we were invited to participate in the global effort. The first face to face meeting of this team is going to be in February in Singapore. I am going to represent our area at the meeting.

I then heard that my good friend, Trey Lewis, who is the director of my old department in Orlando was going to attend. I sent him an email telling him that I was looking forward to seeing him and that he should bring my dad along (For those of you that don’t know, my dad is a project manager for Campus Crusade in that same department).

Before I knew it, I got an email from my dad saying that Trey couldn’t go to the meeting and that my dad was going to go. I didn’t believe it until I heard it from my dad’s mouth, but it looks like it is going to happen. Now I’m really looking forward to it! I would have never guess that dad & I would have to go halfway around the world to see each other. It will be good to work together again. I told him that he should bring my mom along, but she wasn’t too keen on taking a 30 hour flight to spend 3 days on her own while we are in meetings (I can understand that. 30 hours sounds brutal). My flight is similar to flying to the US from here and takes 8 or 9 hours after a short hop to somewhere in Western Europe.

Look foward to seeing you Dad!!!

[thumb:134:l] Yesterday was a big step forward on the major project that I’m working on. I’m working on a team that is trying to build an Information System for the Campus Ministry in Eastern Europe & Russia. We want to provide a web-based tool that will allow staff to keep track of the things relevant to their ministry as well as to help them make decisions about which ministry activities to engage in. It will also provide data to leadership at the national, area, and global levels to understand what is going on in these ministries.

Needless to say, this is a huge undertaking. Our first step is to talk to our field staff and better understand what they do, how they think about it, and how they make decisions. To do this, we are conducting focus groups in Hungary, Ukraine, & Romania to help us.

Yesterday, was the first one, and it went very well. We didn’t cover as much as we would have liked, but that is part of the learning process in the first one. We had about 7-8 people from our Hungarian team participate. The time was moderated by our new team member, Scott Friderich, who is a researcher and missionary here in Budapest. He has been a great addition to our team.

I go out of the picture in a few weeks because of my surgery, but I know Scott, Jerry & Scott Neel will carry on in my absence!!